As a tribute to the British director Val Guest who died last year, we'll be presenting a short season including his own favourite works.

Brighton, London, Manchester and Bath were the settings for a powerful series of city-set films made by Guest between 1960 and 1963. All evocatively shot on location by cinematographer Arthur Grant, the films explore these British cities as sites for the criminal underworld, quarantine and disease and environmental catastrophe.

HELL IS A CITY (PG)

Starring Stanley Baker, John Crawford, Donald Pleasance, Maxine Audley, Billie Whitelaw. UK 1960. 96mins.

A gritty and uncompromising noir thriller shot on the mean streets of Manchester. Cinema great Stanley Baker stars as hard-boiled Inspector Harry Martineau tracking down an escaped villain who has broken out of jail and headed back to Manchester to get revenge. Shot entirely on location, Guest approached it ‘almost as a semi-documentary, as if we were a newsreel team’. With Arthur Grant’s beautiful black and white ‘Hammersccope’ cinematography, he makes terrific use of Manchester's streets, rooftops and surrounding moors. Stanley Black's stylish jazz score expertly propels the film and Guest surrounds Baker with top-flight supporting actors, including a young Donald Pleasence and Billie Whitelaw.

THE DAY THE EARTH CAUGHT FIRE (15) New Print

Starring: Edward Judd, Janet Munro, Leo Mckern, Michael Goodlife. UK 1961. 98mins.

London is sweltering in record temperatures and the River Thames has dried up. The Sahara has flooded, New York is suffering unseasonable blizzards and there are tornados in Russia. A strangely prescient vision of climate change and global warming, THE DAY THE EARTH CAUGHT FIRE was made at the height of the Cold War and highlighted the idiocies of the nuclear age. Guest’s Bafta-winner follows the repercussions of superpowers USA and Soviet Union detonating nuclear bombs simultaneously at the North and South poles, spinning the earth off of its axis and sending it hurtling toward the sun. Combining the thriller and science fiction genres to great effect, newspapermen Bill Maguire (Leo Mckern) and Peter Stenning (Edward Judd) dig deep to uncover the terrible truth. The images of the capital’s empty streets are the setting for a tense and gripping disaster movie prefiguring more recent work such as Danny Boyle’s SUNSHINE.

JIGSAW (PG)

Starring Jack Warner, Ronald Lewis, with John Le Mesurier. UK 1962. 107mins.

A murder mystery shot on location all over Brighton (and briefly in Lewes) starring Jack Warner of TV’s DIXON OF DOCK GREEN fame. The Brighton constabulary painstakingly assemble the jigsaw of clues as they attempt to track down the murderer of a woman found in an isolated house. Jigsaw is marked by an unprecedented level of co-operation between police and filmmakers in a screenplay inspired by the Brighton Trunk Murders of the 1930s.

80,000 SUSPECTS (adv PG)

Starring: Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson, Yolande Donlan, Michael Goodliffe, Cyril Cusack. UK 1963. 113mins.

New Year’s eve celebrations are brought to an abrupt halt when a case of smallpox plunges the city of Bath into quarantine. Dr Steven Monks (Richard Johnson) attempts to locate the source of the outbreak whilst trying to hold together his disintegrating relationship with his wife Julie (Claire Bloom) a dedicated nurse. The epidemic forms the backdrop for a melodrama featuring sickness and adultery but Guest blends documentary elements and an impressive use of location to instil a sense of realism.